The math here… 40,000 units housing, say, 5 people each, can house 200,000 people. The population of Burkina Faso is 16 million, and growing at, say, 3% a year. So every year there are about 500,000 more people in the country! So I hope the government is talking about a funding model where it can do this housing program every single year for the next 20 years. The scale of the urban housing crisis in Burkina Faso will quickly become immense.

The government of Burkina Faso on Monday officially launched a program of construction of 40,000 houses by 2020, costing more than CFA 500 billion francs in a bid to make “housing affordable to all Burkinabe.”The National Housing Program (PNCL) aims to “establish a sustainable mechanism for the production of decent housing accessible to the majority of the population with low incomes”.